Hector ’87 | Retro Video Gaming

From May 10th until May 17th HiscoreHeroes are hosting a competition on Instagram to celebrate Hudson’s 40th anniversary! This is the main reason why my interest and also frustration has grown for this game called Hector ’87, also known as Starship Hector in the US.

The goal is to get the best score in the 2 minute score attack mode in either the Japanese version of Hector ´87 or the NTSC NES version Starship Hector. I had the Famicom version since before, never paid much attention to this game until I saw this competition, but I decided to give it a go!

Another very important rule to the competition is that you are not allowed to use any type of turbo fire, you must button mash! So, the right button fires bombs to hit ground targets and the left button fires shots to hit flying targets. After several evenings of button mashing until my entire arm was sore I managed to reach a score of 296.000. But other people have over 350.000!! I know how I could get at least 30.000 more, but the problem is THIS BASTARD:

I’ve tried playing the game with turbo fire just to see if he’s even mortal, and yes he is, but he takes soooo many shots! I haven’t even been able to kill him a single time without turbo fire!! The second problem is the letters.. There are hidden letters under little mud piles that you can collect by bombing with a LOT of bombs, and the last letter will give you 100.000 points! Here’s where you will find them, what the piles looks like and what it looks like when the letters are revealed:

However, the last letter is located right next to the mid-boss-bastard, so without turbo fire, even if I would be able to kill the bastard, I would have no time to collect the last letter! >_< THIS GAME IS STUPID! IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY! I don’t understand how it would be possible to do both, unless you can button-mash in an incredibly stabile and super-fast-turbo-auto-fire speed! Can you???
I sure as hell can’t… :(

After seeing photos on instagram of all the people reaching scores way above 300k I realized they were all playing the NES NTSC version, Starship Hector. This made me wonder if there were any differences between these two games. Maybe I was playing the more difficult one?? :D So, when going to the Swedish retro gaming exhibition this saturday I only had one big objective, which was to find an NTSC version of Starship Hector. AND I DID! :D

That evening me and my friend NinjaBrite played Starship Hector with big hopes of reaching even higher scores . but.. it was just the same. Just as hard, same enemies, same fire rate, same speed, same ship, same damn score, same everything! >_< I give up…

If you have a copy of Hector ’87 or Starship Hector and you want to compete, then you can read more about the competition on HiscoreHeroes instagram :) I hope there will be more competitions soon, this was great fun, even though it has been incredibly frustrating o_O

Some other advice for people trying to reach the high score (cause I’ve given up..)
Don’t kill the bunkers immediately, they will keep spawning flying spike-bombs that explode, however if you manage to shoot and kill one it gives 2.000 points!
There are hidden triggers in the ground that will make everything on screen on the ground explode if you reveal and destroy the triggers with 2 bombs. (You will still get the same score as if you would have shot the enemies) I have found 4 of them and they are in these locations:

And here’s the points you get for various enemies:

1st letter 10.000 2nd letter 20.000 3rd letter 50.000 4th letter 100.000	Mid-boss 20.000	This guy 10.000
Mr. Guy’s tiny friend 5.000	Big Amoeba 5.000	Spike-bombs 2.000
Squiddy 2.000	Angry crab-head 2.000	Boss Cannon 2.000
Bunkers 1.000	Tiny Amoeba 1.000	Ship thingy 500
Round ship 500	Cannons 500	Boss 500 points (x4 for each bomb-thingy)
Health bars (if you have full health) 500	Boss shots 0 points :(